writer, explorer, cat herder

Repats.

Home. Baltimore. April showers are actually flurries sometimes in the unseasonable cold. Sirens, horns honking, streets slick with rain. In some neighborhoods the houses are vacant and the corners are patrolled. In others, the eggs are locally sourced and the beer is craft. Everything is so loudly and unabashedly American, and we walked back into conversations about civil and women’s reproductive rights. (Now they also inexplicably involve an angry orange man who thinks he can lead a country.)

We have been gone for years and so little has changed. It’s surreal, frustrating, and comforting.

The last few weeks were a marathon finish to exit one country and enter another with very little time to process the Brussels attacks. In some ways I’m sure this was helpful, and in others we are waiting for the unprocessed emotions and fears to reveal themselves. Like everything messy and complicated, this will take time to untangle. And, thankfully, time we have. Loads of it. Hopeful, optimistic heaps of it.

Moment to moment, one foot in front of the other, we re-patriate. We move further away from that life in the desert and begin to root back into the concrete here.